Thursday, December 06, 2012

Gaza is not back to normal / A Gaza pas de retour a la normale, 05.12.2012

(c) Anne Paq/Activestills.org, Beit Hanoun, Mohammad Ahmad, in front of his home demolished during an Israeli airstrike, 01.12.2012

I am out of
Gaza, finally, after one intensive month.

I could not write back to you individually but
thanks for your messages. It was nice to
receive them. It gave me strength.

I need now time to digest and recover. For me it was only one
month with one particular week that was hard, a week during which more than 170
Palestinians were killed and more than 1,400 were injured. There was no safe
place and the bombings, death and devastation were all around.

I could go out any time, I chose to stay.
Palestinians in Gaza do not have this luxury. They have been bombed, attacked,
occupied and under siege for generations. A tight siege has been enforced for 6
years with the active complicity of the international community. It’s not about
the rockets, a truce has been successfully enforced by hamas but has been
repeatedly broken by Israel. Besides the only way to stop the Palestinian
resistance is simply to give them their rights.

I know that
already Gaza is fading away from the mainstream media and many people think things
are back to “normal” but there is nothing normal about life in Gaza. Gaza is
still occupied, is still locked up, and since the pseudo “ceasefire” several
Palestinians were killed near the border and around 30 fishermen were kidnapped
by the Israeli navy. And I am not even talking about the trauma following last
week. Yesterday there was a storm and everybody started to freak out because of
the thunder. There is nothing normal about Gaza.